Nick smiled. “But they’re good?”
“Everybody’s good.” Kyle met his eyes. “I’m guessing you’re itching to get to the real reason for these beers, which you’re buying, by the way.”
“It’s the least I can do,” Nick said. “So? Did you find anything interesting?”
He’d second-guessed his decision to reach out to Kyle at least a dozen times, but in the end, his curiosity about Alexa Nash had gotten the better of him. Turned out there was more there than met the eye, starting with the fact that she’d almost been killed in a gruesome car accident that had killed her best friend the summer between high school and college.
The details had felt vaguely familiar to Nick as he’d read the old headlines, but he’d been at Boston University at the time, deep in college life. It had probably registered as one of many daily tragedies on the news.
The thing that had stood out to Nick — other than the fact that Alexa Nash had had to delay her college plans while she rehabbed a leg the doctors said they might not be able to save, and the fact that she’d lost her best friend — was that the driver of the car who hit them had left the scene.
“Depends on what you mean by interesting,” Kyle said, pulling Nick back to the present.
“Come on, man. You know what I mean.”
Kyle sighed and rubbed his forehead. “I gotta admit when you called I thought you might have gone around the bend.”
“But?” Nick prodded.
“There are some… anomalies.”
“Anomalies?”
“Few pages missing from the file, some redactions that don’t make sense…” Kyle shrugged. “You know how it goes.”
Nick did know. He knew that most of the men and women of the BPD were true public servants, men and women who signed up for a job that could cost them their lives for pay that barely put them in the middle class because they wanted to protect and serve. He knew that for the most part, the officers did their damnedest to see that the law was upheld, that strong cases were made for the DA to prosecute when the time came.
He also knew there were exceptions.
“Any idea why?” Nick asked.
Kyle shook his head. “What’s going on, Murphy? This hit-and-run is over ten years old.”
Nick took a drink of the beer, growing warmer by the minute. “You know who Alexa Nash is now?”
“Yeah, I fucking know,” Kyle said. “I’m not a dimwit. Which is why I’ll ask again: what the fuck is going on? Because you know I’d do anything for you, but I’m not super pumped about someone at the department finding out I’ve been digging around in an Assistant AG’s old accident file.”
“You were careful?” Nick asked.
Kyle sighed. “I was careful. That’s not the point.”
“I know,” Nick said. Part of him wanted to confess, to tell Kyle the truth: he’d been compelled by Alexa Nash — by her cool facade and curvaceous body and the way she seemed perfectly capable of taking him apart bit by bit — since the moment she’d walked into the MIS office. It might have ended there, at good old-fashioned lust, had he not gone digging for more information.
But he had, and the more he dug, the more fascinated he became. Alexa Nash had been her high school valedictorian, bound for Stanford when the accident that killed her best friend decimated her own body.
Instead of giving up, she’d fought. The follow-up pieces he’d found online described an excruciating physical therapy regimen, her doctors and therapists raving about her strength and courage. He’d watched her grow up before his eyes, starting with the pictures of her healthy and glowing in high school, through the photos of her right after the accident, her face beaten and bruised, her neck in a brace, one arm in a cast, her leg restrained in a complicated contraption involving several rods and pins.
They hadn’t been sure they would be able to save the leg, but they had. She had. And she’d gone on to BU pre-law, eventually finishing at the top of her class and passing the bar the first time out. She’d immediately gone to work as a clerk at the AG’s office, and the rest, as they say, was history.
“This some case you’re working on?” Kyle shifted in the booth’s bench seat. “I mean, I’m not asking if any of it’s true, what the papers were saying, but is this work?”
“Not exactly,” Nick said.
Kyle stared at him for a few seconds before he shook his head. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“What?” Nick asked.
“You asked me to access records for a piece of ass.”